For the first 43 Father's Days in the history of me, my father was always within a hour's drive. This made it easy to facilitate our tradition of 1) barbecuing Dad's rosemary chicken and 2) barking at some neighbor kid to stop using our goddamn garage as a backstop.

This spring, however, my folks scraped up 33 years of memories (plus several large pictures of boats) and moved it all to New England. This is mostly a good thing, since the youngest neighbor kid is in his late 50s. But it also meant that, for the first time, Father's Day with my dad's physical presence wasn't possible. And I'm a little frightened about trying to explain Skype to him, as my parents are still navigating their new cable channels. Food Network is like a Mars probe to these people.

Anyway, before they left they made sure to offload a few dozen crates of my childhood--pictures, letters from camp, everything I ever scribbled on anything ever. Because my parents, to their very great credit, are terrific Keepers of Keepsakes. And now I get to show Robert some of the stories I wrote when I was his age, and he can dismiss them as puerile and jejune.

The point is, between my parents' abscondage and my job's gone-dage, I've got a lot of my past and recent present stacked all over my little apartment, which might best be described as the Laid-Off Labyrinth. And the minotaur at the center eats orphaned tube socks.

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One thing that informed Robert's attitude during his playoff baseball game was that if his team had won, the championship game would have conflicted with his best friend's birthday party. Losing the game, therefore, at least saved me some Sturm and Drang.

Yesterday, however, Robert came home from school obdurately opposed to attending the party. Because his best friend "brags too much about his writing."

I really hope one of them gets to review the other's work some 30 years from now, so that media wags will know that the feud started here, over five pages about 11th-century kung fu warriors.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite short stories was "Obstinate Uncle Otis," about a guy who simply refused to acknowledge anything he didn't agree with. Someone would complain about that new building spoiling the view of the mountains, for example, and the always laconic and ornery Otis would respond, "What building? I can see the mountains just fine."

I think of this story during most conversations I have with TwoBert, who is right right right all the time. Whereas Robert might sit and ponder the riddle of the Sphinx, TwoBert would shake the Sphinx by the lapels until its nose fell off.

A classic example of this is the Word Game, where each person says a word that begins with the last letter of the previous one. T and I have just started playing on long subway rides while R buries his nose in a book with disgust. One of our latest rounds went like this:

Me: Down.TwoBert: Town.Me: No. What does "down" end with?T: N.Me: And what sound does N make?T: NNNNNNNNNNN.Me: Good. So does "town" begin" with NNNNNN?T: Yes.Me: No it doesn't.T: Yes is does.Me: No, it begins with the "tuh" sound. What letter makes the "tuh" sound?T: T! For TwoBert!Me: Right! TwoBert and town. So it doesn't begin with N.T: Yes it does.Me: No it doesn't.T: YES!Me: Nnnnnope.T: YYYYEEEESSSSSSS!

And so on. And it takes every fiber of Robert's self restraint to keep from getting up into TwoBert's grille and calling him a "hapless oaf"--the current epithet on the hardscrabble streets of NYC.

The cool thing about Otis's story is that one day he is struck by lightning, and the things he disbelieves in--like that building--start to disappear. Then Otis has a bout of amnesia, forgets who he is, and disbelieves himself out of existence.

A fate that Robert increasingly wishes would befall TwoBert with each passing day.

Today has been weird since the get-go. We didn't exactly charge out of the blocks this morning; TwoBert insisted on taking another shower, because 1) he had gotten "REALLY REALLY DIRTY!" overnight, and 2) now he is "ALL GROWED UP!" We hit some massive vehicular snarls on the highway and, just as I was making my last turn before parking at Robert's school, we nearly ran over Ira Glass. Yes, I was moving briskly, but the dude was wandering in the middle of the road looking for a cab and oblivious to the many cars that quite legally could have ended his American life.

T's school year is over, but Robert, public-school sucker that he is, has two weeks left. So the little one and I have been spending lots of time together, on our own. I've thought recently that, throughout the life of this blog, TwoBert has gotten the greens end of the carrot. As second children often do. You might not know, for example, that when he was a toddler we had lots of "accidents" involving me being "struck" in the "plums," in a brazen attempt to preserve his role as Darling Baby instead of Forgotten Middle Kid.

We're approaching the Single Dad's Summer of Zone Defense, when Daddy squares off against two entirely different sets of tastes, wants, needs, and thought processes. This gap can be boiled down the the essential Big Apple litmus test: the bagel. Robert insists on plain, and TwoBert won't eat anything but an everything.

I played a lot of sports in high school, but I didn't get a whole lot of playing time. (Am I right, high school classmates that are my new Facebook BFFs 4EVER?) In fact, if the game wasn't close and the starters were ready to come out, you might have heard a cheer rise up: "Clear the bench! Put in French!" Which you can take as either endearing or derisive, depending on your interpretation of the adolescent mind. (OK. It was derisive.)

I got four varsity letters, and three of them were presumably for 1) being a senior and 2) remembering my uniform. The one letter I actually earned was for golf, for which I actually started more than half the matches and actually helped my team actually win a few. And let me tell you, a letter with a golf bag on it looks completely bad-ass on one of those leather-sleeved varsity jackets.

I was a spindly punk, but I also never that fire-in-the-gut competitive edge. In fact, I sort of went the other way and derided people who did. One guy in particular was my JV varsity coach, a real tool with a pockmarked face, pornstache, talent for trouser hockey. He used to stand with his hand in his too-tight sweatpants and bark cliches at us while we ran windsprints or lay-up drills. And my buddy Rich and I would crack wise, saying stuff I wish I could remember because I'm sure it was overflowing with withering and pitiless wit. To the point where the coach took us aside and called us "cancerous agents" and benched us for the rest of the season.

Cut to: senior year soccer. For three years I had been coached by our history teacher, a sweet guy whose main claim to competency was that he was Hungarian. Practices were easy, and we got shellacked every game. Senior year, however, we got a new coach, a former all-state player who knew what he was doing. He ran us mercilessly, mile after weary mile, until we all prayed for the sweet release of death. I was killing myself like everyone else but not playing much because 1) he wanted to win and 2) I didn't really care. So for the last game of the season, I turned my jersey inside out and wrote "log 3 9" on the back in masking tape, because I knew Coach didn't know a logarithm from a log cabin. I spent the rest of the afternoon running laps around the field until I honked like a seal.

I'm telling you all this because last night's Little League playoff game gave me a flashback moment. The game was sort of uncomfortable from the beginning, because the two coaches obviously didn't like each other. And our coach, a normally even-tempered bloke who had never coached with such high stakes, started getting agitated by errors and other standard 8-year-old goofballery. By barking at kids for swinging at bad pitches or overthrowing the cut-off man, he was sort of dipping his toe in a tributary of Dick Pond.

Late in the game, when it was still tied, Robert got on base with a single. However, the next batter flied out and Robert, oblivious to his coaches' urgings to get back to first, was doubled off. He trotted off the field and didn't seem to care much. But his coach caught him smiling and said something about it, and Robert shot back with "I don't care about this game! I hope we lose!" He spent the rest of the game on the bench, and the team's loss ended the season.

I'm really conflicted about this. I'm glad that Robert seems centered enough not to make winning the fulcrum of his emotions, and poised enough to call bullshit when he sees it. But I also don't want him to doubt his abilities, as I did, and turn to wiseassery as a coping mechanism. I can't fault the coach for benching my kid, but I can't fault Robert, either. Because dude, that was me.

I figure for now, screw it. He's 8. There's plenty of time to watch this mole and see if it grows any larger. But I hope at some point he discovers a desire to strive and succeed as a part of a team, instead of spending his teen years feeling excised.

Last night I had dinner with a friend who's never had much of an itch for sports, and he mentioned how much he was enjoying the World Cup. It occurred to me to include him as a test subject in my ongoing Dull-Off Debate, but I thought better of it because he thinks all sports are boring. I honestly think he'd watch Manning-to-Burress at the end of Super Bowl XLII and ask, "That's good, right?"

Which of course depends. If you grew up in New Jersey idolizing Harry Carson and think even Voldemort has a tough time saying "Pisarcik," then yes. If you support a team led by a cheating jerkface with a complete charismectomy, not so much.

During this Juneblop I've spilled a lot of pixels trying to 1) defend baseball as absolutely nonboring, and 2) squirt children's Tylenol down the throat of World Cup Fever. It would figure that today, when I take it up over at DadCentric, New Zealand scores one of most improbable equalizers in the history of anything, and my alma mater gets spanked out of the College World Series in the dullest, most humiliating way possible.

Over a year ago, a lot of Facebookers took part in a "25 Things About Me" meme that turned out more interesting than I anticipated. When I did it, though, I decided to jazz it up by putting my ePonymous MP3 player on shuffle, taking a lyric from the first song that popped up, and somehow relating it to my life. I got through one-two-three-four-five of them before I got sort of bored, but when the above song shuffled into my headphones this morning, it seemed like a good time to resume.

This is partially due to where my head is at right now, but it also reminded me of my three months in Seoul, training Samsung executives to take the GMAT. They arrived every Monday morning and spent the week reading and studying and chain-smoking and kicking my ass at ping-pong. Then they went home on Friday, leaving me to explore on weekends.

One of my trips was to Panmunjom, where the peace talks between North and South Korea are still officially ongoing. Panmunjom is now the epicenter of bello-tourism, where you can sit on the north side of the negotiating table while North Korean soldiers mug for your camera and wave their AK-47s. And the ROK guards stare back in a constant tae kwon do stance.

It's like at Buckingham Palace, only not nearly as hilarious.

Seoul is also interesting because there aren't really any addresses. When it's time to go home, you tell the cabbie which province you live in, then pepper him with "lefts" and "rights" until you're home. All of which made coming home late at night, pickled in soju, a true adventure.

Spending all that time learning about Korean culture--and the true glory that is a spicy-hot hunk of kim chi--was formative because it was my first trip to Asia, where people look at North America's 400 years of white man's history and snicker quietly to themselves. It's a beautiful country that has everything: mountains, beaches, a baseball league, delicious barbecue. The guy I worked for offered to pay for my honeymoon if I spent it in Cheju-Do, a popular vacation spot off the southern coast. And I might have taken him up on it, if I had any confidence that I'd make it home at night.

As I've paddled through life, I've always viewed the clumps of people I've met as isolated encampments along the riverfront. It's a stupid neurosis, thinking you can treat your classmates and friends and colleagues and Drinkin' Buddies like buttons in a craft cabinet, and Facebook is inexorably freeing me of it.

I'm totally on board with all the skepticism about Facebook's privacy issues, so I signed on tentatively at first. About 95% of my Facebook time was spent staying up all night playing Scrabble. Lately, however, I've managed to friend people who've resurfaced from all over my past lives, and now that I've linked this blog to my news feed, they're all reading this. It's kind of ... freeing, in a completely naked and NSFW sort of way. But hey, fuck it. I'm not working, right?

Or course, it also makes writing snarkily about your life far more difficult.

For example: My old employer has a tradition of giving everyone who leaves a little parting gift, and this year it was an old-fashioned-looking alarm clock. At first I thought this was a little tone-deaf, since thanks to them I no longer need to get up in the morning. But I didn't want to offend Sarah, who was head of the hospitality committee and is completely funny and great. In fact, she would be one of the real drawbacks of leaving the job if she weren't also leaving. She's moving across the country, but thanks to Facebook we can keep in touch, and share updates of our Departure Clocks, and devote our lives to furthering pointless bullshit at the expense of anything even remotely productive.

So, to all of you new to this blog, welcome. This should make our catch-up conversations at reunions mercifully brief, so I can file you where you belong--with the Drinkin' Buddies.

As much as I wanted our first Beachdammit Day of the summer, it never came to be. What was supposed to be just a quick scootering around the park led to a birthday party full of kids who liked to build stuff in the woods and brandish sticks as firearms. Four hours later, the boys were sweaty and spent, and half the day was gone.

During our siesta, we flicked on the TV and surfed between the World Cup and a baseball game. And this seemed like a great opportunity to research the debate I've been having with a few friends who think baseball is more boring than soccer.

I love baseball. I love the strategies. I love the stats. I love that the difference between a mammoth home run and a harmless pop fly is a quarter inch on the barrel of the bat. You can have a lucky day, but you can't have a lucky career. It's relaxing, it's invigorating, it's heartbreaking. And I can watch it for hours.

In my view, soccer has two big strikes against it. (Strikes!) One, it has ties. There's something very unsatisfying about watching 90 minutes of nothing and coming away with nothing decided. Two, comebacks are a lot harder to come by. A baseball game can turn around in a flash with a three-run homer, but if a soccer team is up two goals in the second half, you know it's over. The leading team can pack the defense and stifle the other team to death.

And in further defense, I humbly offer the data I harvested from this afternoon. While we watched college baseball, the kids were transfixed. Then we switched over to the USA/England soccer match, and Robert wandered off to sketch his 5G phone prototype, and TwoBert face-planted on the couch.